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Paper: Systemization and Use of Atomic Data for Astrophysical Modeling
Volume: 172, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems VIII
Page: 25
Authors: Brickhouse, Nancy S.
Abstract: The growth of supercomputing capabilities over the past decade has led to tremendous opportunities to produce theoretical atomic data for use in modeling astrophysical plasmas; however, not all data are created equally. Both accurate and complete atomic data are important to astrophysical modeling via plasma codes. Critical theoretical evaluations, experimental benchmarks, and even astrophysical observations themselves are all useful in assessing the temperatures, densities, opacities, abundances, and other physical quantities determined from spectroscopy. The database challenge for the future is to move toward increasing both flexibility and standardization of atomic data formats so that the quality of the data can be taken into account in modeling. Problems in X-ray spectroscopy will illustrate the importance of opening up what has often been a black box to many astronomers.
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